The (non)Book of Eli

There are many stories to tell about our motivations for creating Eli Review. One goes back to my dissertation research at Purdue, where I studied the way experienced teachers adapted to new technologies in the classroom. The headline from that study: technologies that support writing have pedagogies built into them. Often, those pedagogies clash with those the teacher has. The takeaway from this is straighforward, but hardly simple. Rhetorics can live not only in books and articles, but in machines and software. When they do, they can transform practice in powerful ways.

What would it mean for us to build rhetorics and pedagogies into our own writing environments? That has been one of the driving questions of my career. And so it is one of the stories behind Eli. Eli is not the first system I had a hand in creating to embody a theory of rhetoric. But it is, by just about any standard, the most successful attempt. Eli is used every day by hundreds or even thousands of teachers and students. More than all the people who've ever read an article or book chapter I wrote, to be sure. Likely more than all the people who've ever heard me speak about research, theory, or pedagogy.

Eli embodies many theories about the way writing works. Far more than I can usefully wedge into an article and still have the article remain coherent. In Eli's deep structure - the data formats that represent people, texts, and actions in the system - lie counterintuitive ideas about textuality that mash the ideas of Derrida, Barthes, and Iser together. Eli doesn't see texts that are part of reviews as coherent wholes. Rather, a text is a surface upon which the social actions of a review unfold.  Texts provide an ability to index actions, relate them to one another, and provide a view of what would ordinarily be invisible social interactions back to writers, reviewers, and review coordinators. And while texts in Eli are palimpsests, they are also social actors of a sort. That is, we understand that over the course of a review, texts assume the agency of various human users for whom they stand in. And when I say we "understand" this, I mean we've built representations of review activity that explicitly support what, in Actor-Network Theory terms, are moments of inscription, enrollment, and interresement in the course of a review. We even have an algorithm for evaluating review success based on this progression, a novel measure of review *activity* rather than review comments or texts.

Eli also carries our ideas about how people learn to write. One radical one is that people can learn as much or more from reviewing work by others as they can by writing. Another, less radical thought for most writing teachers that is still difficult to act upon in a traditional classroom is that where writers *do* learn from writing, they do so most effectively from revision. Eli provides an environment where review can play a more prominent role in learning to write simply by making the coordination of review activity far easier and faster to do. Eli also provides an environment where writers can get more high-quality feedback more often, allowing more of their writing time to be spent on revising.

If Eli were a book, I could never get an editor to allow me to put all the ideas that make it work into one volume. It would appear to stray, to lose focus, or to vacillate wildly from the minutae of poststructuralist theories of language to the currently-in-fashion ontological perspectives of ANT to the pragmatic ideas of writing researchers like Britton and Hillocks. In Eli, they live as comfortably as an engine, drive train, and electronic ignition controls in a contemporary car, systems that stem from ideas of different eras, with different theories, all working seamlessly together.

Book Review: Angela Haas, American Indians, and Rhetoric

Book Review:
Haas, Angela M. “A Rhetoric of Alliance: What American Indians Can Tell Us About Digital and Visual Rhetoric.” Dissertation. 2008.

When deciding on a book to review I chose a dissertation that I’ve wanted to read in its entirety for some time. My background is in public policy and comparative studies in race and ethnicity, so I’ve always had fun trying to understand my identity as a scholar of rhetoric. However, the weaving of my multiple scholarly trainings is of the utmost importance to me as a cultural rhetorics scholar. So I’ll try to sort through all of that while also telling you about Angela Haas. 

In “A Rhetoric of Alliance,” Angela Haas takes on the task of tracing how American Indians have been represented in relation to technology by both Natives and non-Natives alike. Haas describes her project as follows:
"Specifically, my dissertation aims to rupture racial stereotypes and widely held theoretical and political assumptions by providing case studies on specific culturally-sitated technological practices of a specific race, utilize a broader, more flexible, and more historically-situated definition of technology and considerations of technological theories and practices, thereby reflecting a larger history of technological design and use by people of color" (70).

What I appreciate about this project is the manner in which it deconstructs culturally specific theories of technology to broaden the utility of professional writing practice and study. For example, as an rhetoric scholar Haas goes to great lengths to highlight the commonalities in the theory of the communication medium (or the skill or art of what she sees) as opposed to a given author’s utility of it. By doing so, a reader is able to see how shifting the perspective from studying the product to studying the process of making meaning, particularly in the context of Native making practices and digital technologies. It’s not an argument of better or before, but of the affordances of seeing how they’re related (I’ll return to this a little later). The secret to this argument, though, lies in her methodology.

Angela describes her theoretical framework as an "indiscipline," noting how she pulls three distinct fields together to inform conversations for Rhetoric and Writing as well as American Indian Studies (145). What I see her doing to achieve this is describing how her multiple, mixed methods collaboratively construct a picture of teaching, research, and scholarship that accounts for politics, identity, culture, dominance/power, and historical/social contexts (see pp. 170-190 for an in-depth exploration of pedagogical strategies). Angela’s methods specifically include literature reviews, rhetorical analyses of theories, historiographical/archival research, case studies, oral history, and interviews (60). And through these data she asks her readers to see how such knowledge might make them reimagine their pedagogy, as it did for me when I taught Science and Technology as a First Year Writing Course.

So, how will my work benefit from grappling with such methodological concerns? As I see it now, the affordances of generating a discourse informed by multiple methods and multiple fields of study increases the utility/applicability of an argument. I would argue that the strongest feature of Haas’ dissertation is in the realm of pedagogy, and this is largely a result of her orientation as a cultural rhetorics scholar. Haas explains that “cultural rhetorics inquiry is concerned with challenging traditional canons of rhetorical thought through the study of rhetorics historically margianalized or unrecognized by Western culture and with constructing new methodologies for investigating the plurality of histories of rhetoric" (8). When it comes to teaching a class on science and technology, consider the power in the pedagogical decision to interrogate cultural notions of science and technology. In my mind this is a big move because it facilitates the possibility of student learning outcomes to include politics and everyday life.

Again, I appreciate that Haas’ work encourages a shift of theoretical perspective and orientation surrounding the topics of technology and writing. But also useful is the way in which she connects the pedagogical with the political in order to illuminate 1) disciplinary shortcomings and 2) practical methods of challenging the dominance of colonial notions of knowledge-making.

The Politics of Technology in Curriculum and Instruction

Reading Response 4:
Carroll, David. “Mobile Learning Tools: A Teachable Moment in the Age of the App.” In Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.

As you may have read in my post on how/who I understand my students to be, I recognize myself as a teacher who is not technologically proficient in digital environments. It is because of this that I found David Carrol’s piece to be especially helpful for understanding how scholars who DO experiment pedagogically with common, new technologies think about instruction.

The greatest strength in Carroll’s article can be found in the way he coordinates a review of the scholarly conversations surrounding mobile technologies with macro-level, societal concerns. For example, Carroll emphasizes a strong need for balancing private technological development with public access and use. Comparing institutional desires with the legal constraints in corporate development, Carroll argues that we need to move toward a disentangling of private and public interests in the realm of systemic educational development. In other words, the “ad hoc” manner in which schools locate funding for technologies may in fact be to the detriment of the students in the long run as a result of capitalist drives.

For me this piece is useful for the questions it raises about seeking and adopting new technologies into classrooms and curricula. The lines between private profit and public education are so blurred at this point it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine who is really profiting: students or the owners of the corporate firms developing and selling the technologies. I, like David Carroll, favor the development of educational technologies in so far as access and enhancing learning remain higher priorities than profit and scale.

Fitzpatrick and New Technologies

Reading Response 3:
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Google Wave: Pedagogical Success, Technological Failure?” In Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s piece on Google Wave is an excellent article for contemplating the incorporation of new, complex technologies in writing classrooms. On one hand, this is a success story focusing on the affordances of incorporating socially-geared digital environments into one’s pedagogy. On the other, this is a cautionary tale for scholars who may be made vulnerable by a tool mismatched for the learning. I can’t help but think of Latour’s Aramis here.

—Check out my brief overview of Bruno Latour’s Aramis, or the Love of Technology if you would like to know where this is coming from—

Fitzpatrick’s piece does a phenomenal job of highlighting just how powerful a strategic application of new technology can be. Given that Google designed Wave to help people engage writing in social spaces, it provided an ideal format for one unit during a semester. Fitzpatrick wanted students to think and gather information socially and collaboratively. I recognize her decision to experiment with communication environment rather than type of product to be a sound strategy worth emulating. However, because of the overwhelming influence of corporate strategies in developing mass-market systems there’s also a downside. 

As in the case with Aramis, “the most crucial problem was perhaps that Wave’s users—and more importantly its evangelists—didn’t have a clear enough sense of what the system was actually good for” (paragraph 9). The pitfall in using technologies like Google Wave is that large, systemic shifts in business models and technical support often subvert the ability of people to meaningfully engage technology consistently over time. Either educators must become endlessly adaptable, or more rigid in their infrastructural demands.

For me I take this as a practical lesson in pedagogical portability. I value a technology’s applicability over its complexity any day of the week. Maybe it’s my favor toward inductive pedagogy?

Mark Sample and What it Means to Teach

Reading Response 2:
Sample, Mark. “The Question of Expert Learners.” In Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy.

In “The Question of Expert Learners,” Sample asks teachers to return to a fundamental question: What do we mean by teaching? I find this to be a useful rhetorical move because it asks teachers to bring their own practices to light alongside Sample’s sharing of experience. Or, in other words, reimagining teaching by reframing learning. The overall argument is simple: if pedagogical decisions are based on theories of learning as a process/skill, a teacher is far more likely to succeed in teaching something. That’s it.

But I think that’s a complicated notion. Sample identifies intentionality, reflection, and accountability as principles for guiding learning. Essentially, if one’s authorial moves can purposefully engage these principles then learning will unfold in the process itself. Sample prefers to think of it as “guided inquiry or cognitive apprenticeship,” where the teacher or other students may guide one another from beginning learner to expert learner. This path, Sample argues, offers a classroom many in roads to learning and development.

I find this essay to be highly pragmatic and applicable to any classroom setting. Those who study art forms know that the processes involved in learning a skill or art are often compatible, if not directly translatable to another skill or art. And the reason for this: we all share some degree of commonality in how we learn, even if our idiosyncrasies differ. Such knowledge can help build strong teachers in my book.

Vygotsky and Learning

Reading Response 1:
Vygotsky, Lev S. “Interaction Between Learning and Development.” Excerpted from Readings on the Development of Children. 1978.

What do we know the teaching of writing is all about? Psychology. Enter Vygotsky and his zone of proximal development. I appreciate scholars who work to make the teaching of writing more accessible and ultimately easier, and this piece is especially useful for those looking for theories of learning.

Attempting to extend the location of learning to include realms beyond the classroom, Vygotsky challenges traditional theories of education. He argues that “any learning a child encounters in school always has a previous history,” meaning that school is not the primary source of development (32). With this knowledge, I don’t believe it is difficult to see how such an idea alone can change the way teachers approach lesson plans or interactions with students. Yet his argument continues to grow.

Specifically, Vygotsky explains the common knowledge that when properly matched, the type of learning and a child’s developmental level can be powerful, coordinated tools for enhancing a learning environment. To provide evidence the author identifies two developmental levels to showcase the relational differences. The first, “actual development,” is “the level of development of a child’s mental functions that has been established as a result of certain already completed developmental cycles” (32). The zone of proximal development, on the other hand, traces a student’s “internal course of development,” or their state of learning as they are in the process of building. This is useful to pay attention to because it can be used as a method of teaching students self sufficiency with a given subject (a result of its prospective characterization) (33).

Learning itself is not development based on Vygotsky’s research. And this conclusion should have serious implications for how we imagine the teaching of writing in particular. If students learn faster than their processes of development can keep up with, then teachers must adjust the location and effects of their developmental lessons/moments.

A Set of Learning Goals

Share a Set of Learning Goals:
Here is a brief description of the focus of and goals for an online course engaging Science and Technology from a Cultural Rhetorics standpoint.

As the course title suggests we will spend this semester thinking, reading, and writing about science and technology in the world. For the purposes of our section I built a course asking you to consider the use of science and technology in your everyday lives, in your academic careers, and also in your potential future careers. Under the frame of “The Tools We Use,” we will engage in activities that exercise your critical thinking and analytical skills while practicing for the demands of college writing. Much of what I ask you to do will be based on your own experience. Therefore, the best advice I can give you is to stay close to what you know from your everyday life, and then use the research skills we practice to build on your knowledge. Our specific goals for our section are as follows:
-Assess scholarly notions of Science & Technology as cultural practices
-Critically evaluate our own uses of technologies to better understand how we learn
-Use writing to better understand technology, and technology to better understand writing (ELI Review)
-Engage in academic research processes as a method of knowledge-building
-Understand writing as a communal activity, not an individual one.

My Students

My Students:
I do know that there’s one thing I can count on in a given semester as a teacher: my students often have more (and more advanced) technological literacies than I.

Working at Michigan State University I teach students from all over the world. So yes, pinpointing who they are is certainly difficult. One cultural phenomenon that is fairly commonplace is the use of the internet for knowledge production. Anybody who visits YouTube can be instructed on how to do myriad things in a matter of minutes. With an increase of knowledge availability comes a strain on knowledge application. Today it’s getting increasingly easier for students to acquire a little knowledge about many things; it’s far more difficult to acquire a lot of knowledge about a few things using the internet. The implications for college writing here are potentially large depending on how a teacher negotiates  a student’s technological utilization.

Another category of technology use among my students is entertainment. I am not a video-game player, nor do I have a smart phone. Cell phones are one of the few incredibly visible student technologies in the classroom. With the amount of writing many of them do on their phones alone, it is not difficult to make various technologies relevant to classroom activity. As I mentioned in my technology statement, the process of learning one skill or art can be translated into other skills and arts. Sometimes students just need to be asked the right question about how their knowledge of one skill can be made to apply to another.

Video games then (even though I’m not a player) are often one of my favorite subjects to ask students about. It is usually possible to extrapolate the writing mechanic equivalencies after hearing a game described. Mortal Kombat is my favorite example, particularly with my interest in martial arts. When I ask students who play the game about the opponent in the final fight, they describe the artist who has mastered and can apply the styles of all the combatants, and not to mention in the right context.

I do my best to adapt to the learning needs of a teaching situation. This means that my technological choices are highly rhetorical. If there’s a skill I want students to learn, I will do my best to select the most appropriate medium/format the lesson. If I can show students advanced arrangement with sticky notes, I will do so if that is the most effective and efficient way. If there is a rhetorical affordance of choosing another technological medium, I will certainly cater to my audience (commercials, movies, songs, etc.).

I suppose that makes me a technological opportunist, not necessarily enthusiast.

Affordances Analysis

Affordances Analysis:
This summer I taught online for the first time. Needless to say, I learned a lot about what doesn’t work so well in my pedagogy as I translate it to an all-online medium. While theories of writing instruction are relatively portable (“what” we’re looking for), the application of tools sometimes requires tweaking. When faced with the dilemma of how/when to use ELI Review, I learned something about varying review types. Here I offer you what I recognize as the affordances and disaffordances of the ELI Review system under a few common circumstances I encountered.

Conducting a Presence/Absence Review
Sometimes we just need students to double check the assignment requirements. This is among the simplest styles of review, and one that I found most useful toward the end of a review phase (but not the last review itself). Students seem to appreciate the double check, and often times learn more about their own work as they briefly review the work of others (compare/contrast). However, this type of review can only be so useful. To really teach writing we need to assemble different kinds of reviews for different purposes.

Conducting a General Review
For example, a general review—or one that focuses on a structural or interpretive element of a piece of writing—can be used to teach about the concept of audience. By asking a series of affect questions about a text in an ELI Review, students can formatively assess the affect of each other’s work. I’ve found these reviews to be most successful when applied after students have been wrestling with their topics and have at least a draft of their project. If done too early or too late, students seem to view it as busy work.

Conducting a Highly Focused Review
Because ELI encourages the use of multiple metrics it is fairly simple to coordinate measures in a way that engages students on a writerly strategy or tactic. A highly focused review is one in which students engage in a variety of different review processes (rating, commenting, checking boxes, etc.), all geared toward a very specific writerly move (such as a thesis). The affordances of this review can best be seen when reviewing a partial—not a whole—document. Because the cognitive load is high for the highly focused review process, students will get more out of the exercise if they extrapolate the lesson, paying most attention to a few carefully selected processes can convey more than working with an array of lessons and mediums.


So overall ELI is worth appreciating at least for its capacity to be versatile. Unlike some technologies, ELI has been designed to give the user a high degree of agency over the application of the software. With a little strategic (scaffolded) thinking it can be turned into something that’s mighty useful, especially when timed appropriately for the writing needs of a group. 

Technology Statement

Technology Statement:
When it comes to teaching, I like working from principle or theory as it is shaped by practice. What follows is a handful of commitments and beliefs related to my teaching practice. Extrapolation is necessary for now… until I get that teachnology statement all finished up.

I am committed to:
-inquiry as method, process, and mediation
-critical pedagogy
-activities enacting embodied cognition
-teaching students as teachers
-destabilizing oppressive hierarchies
-dialogic problem solving
-deterring those who know too much from going too far

I believe this about learning:
-learning to teach something increases one's ability to understand it
-knowledge-making is a collective activity, not an individualistic one
-after deeply reflecting on experience and practice, the process of learning one skill or art can be translated into other skills and arts
-learning is driven by inquiry, and inquiry is driven by learning

I believe this about technology:
-a technology is only as strong as its operator’s understanding
-a technology’s applicability should outweigh its complexity
-less is more: focusing heavily on a few carefully selected processes can convey more than working with an array of lessons and mediums
-access is among the most important questions for deciding on technological application